ALTERNATIVE NEWS

19 Apr 2017

The Mother Of All Hypocrisy

By Robert Fisk: It was the Mother of all Hypocrisy. Some
dead Syrian babies matter, I guess. Other dead Syrian babies don’t matter. One
mass murder in Syria two weeks ago killed children and babies and stirred
our leaders to righteous indignation. But the slaughter in
Syria this weekend killed even more children and babies – yet
brought forth nothing but silence from those who claim to guard our moral values.
Now why should this be?

When a gas attack in Syria killed more than
70 civilians on 4 April, including babies and children, Donald Trump ordered a
missile attack on Syria. America applauded. So did its media. So did much
of the world. Trump called Bashar al-Assad “evil” and “an animal”. The EU
condemned the Syrian regime. Downing Street called the gas attack “barbaric”.
Almost every western leader demanded that Assad should be overthrown.

Yet after this weekend’s suicide bombing of
a convoy of civilian refugees outside Aleppo killed 126 Syrians, more than 80
of them children, the White House said nothing. Even though the death toll was
far greater, Trump didn’t even Tweet his grief. The US navy launched not even a
symbolic bullet towards Syria. The EU went all coy and refused to say a single
word. All talk of “barbarism” from Downing Street was smothered.

Do they feel no sense of shame? What
callousness. What disgrace. How outrageous that our compassion should dry up
the moment we realised that this latest massacre of the innocents wasn’t quite
worth the same amount of tears and fury that the early massacre had produced.
It fact it wasn’t worth a single tear. For the 126 Syrians – almost all of them
civilians – who have just been killed outside Aleppo, were Shia Muslims being
evacuated from two government-held (ie Bashar-held) villages in the north of
Syria. And their killer was obviously from al-Nusra (al-Qaeda) or one of the
Sunni “rebel” groups we in the West have armed – or quite possibly from
Isis itself – and thus didn’t qualify for our sorrow.

The UN, clip-clopping on to the
stage-boards as usual, did speak out. The latest attack was “a new horror”. And
Pope Francis called it “ignoble” and prayed for “beloved and martyred Syria”.
And having been brought up by a pretty anti-Catholic dad, I said what I often
say when I think the Pontiff has got it right, especially Francis: Good old
Pope! Why, even the virtually non-existent anti-Assad “Free Syrian
Army” condemned the attack as “terrorist”.

But that was it. And I recalled all those
maudlin stories about how Ivanka Trump, as a mother, had been especially
moved by the videotape from Khan Shaykoun, the site of the chemical
attack on 4 April, and had urged her father to do something about it. And then
it was Federica Mogherini, the EU’s ‘High Representative” for foreign
affairs and security policy, who described the attack as “awful” – but insisted
that she spoke “first of all as a mother”. Quite right, too. But what happened
to all her maternal feelings – and those of Ivanka – when the pictures came in
from northern Syria this weekend of exploded babies and children packaged up in
black plastic bags? Silence.

There’s no doubting the flagrant,
deliberate, vile cruelty of Saturday’s attack. The suicide bomber approached
the refugee buses with a cartload of children’s cookies and potato chips –
approaching, I might add, a population of fleeing Shia civilians who had been
starving under siege by the anti-Assad rebels (some of whom, of course, were
armed by us). Yet they didn’t count. Their “beautiful little babies” – I quote
Trump on the earlier gas victims – didn’t stir us to anger. Because they were
Shias? Because the culprits might have been too closely associated with us in
the West? Or because – and here’s the point – they were the victims of the
wrong kind of killer.

For what we want right now is to blame the
“evil”, “animal”, “brutal”, etc, Bashar al-Assad who was first “suspected” to
have carried out the 4 April gas attack (I quote The Wall Street Journal, no
less) and then accused by the entire West of total and deliberate
responsibility of the gas massacre. No-one should question the brutality of the
regime. Nor its torture. Nor its history of massive oppression. Yet there are,
in fact, some grave doubts about Bashar’s responsibility for the 4 April attack
– which he has predictably denied – even among Arabs who loath his Baathist
regime and all it stands for.

Even the leftist but hardly pro-Syrian
Israeli writer Uri Avneri – briefly, in his life, a detective –
has asked why Assad
should commit such a crime when his army and its allies were
winning the war in Syria, when such an attack would gravely embarrass the
Russian government and military, and when it would change the softening western
attitude towards him back towards open support for regime change.

And the regime’s claim that a Syrian air
attack set off explosions in al-Nusra weapons store in Khan Shaykoun
(an idea which the Russians also adopted) would be easier to dismiss if the
Americans had not used precisely the same excuse for the killing of well over a
hundred Iraqi civilians in Mosul in March; they suggested that a US air strike
on an Isis arms lorry may have killed the civilians.

But this has nothing to do with the
weekend’s far more bloody assault on the refugee convoys heading for western
Aleppo. They were part of a now-familiar pattern of mass hostage exchanges
between the Syrian government and its opponents in which Sunni opponents of the
regime in villages surrounded by the Syrian army or its allies have been
trucked out to Idlib and other “rebel”-held areas under safe passage in return
for the freedom of Shia villagers surrounded by al-Nusra, Isis and “our” rebels who
have been allowed to leave their villages for the safety of government-held
cities. Such were the victims of Saturday’s suicide bombing; they were
Shia villagers of al-Foua and Kfraya, along with several government
fighters, en route to what would be – for them – the safety of Aleppo.

Whether or not this constitutes a form of
ethnic cleansing – another of Bashar’s sins, according to his enemies – is
a moot point. Al-Nusra did not exactly urge the villagers of al-Foua and Kfraya
to stay home since they wanted some of their own Sunni fighters back from their
own encircled enclaves. Last month, the governor of Homs pleaded with Sunnis to
leave the city on “rebel” convoys to Idlib to stay in their houses and
remain in the city. But this is a civil war and such terrifying conflicts
divide cities and towns for generations. Just look at Lebanon 27 years after
its civil war ended.

But what ultimately proves our own
participation in this immoral and unjust and frightful civil war is our
reaction to those two massacres of the innocents. We cried over and lamented
and even went to war for those “beautiful
little babies” whom we believed to be Sunni victims of the Assad
government. But when Shia babies of equal humanity were blasted to pieces this
weekend, Trump could not care less. And the mothering spirit of Ivanka and
Federica simply dried up.

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